August 13, 2024
The risk for essential thrombocythemia-related events in patients with the disease can be predicted using currently available clinical data, researchers wrote in a letter to the editor appearing in Blood Cancer Journal.
“Although considered the most indolent myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN), essential thrombocythemia (ET) is linked to burdensome vasomotor symptoms and potentially fatal complications that include thrombosis, hemorrhage, and disease progression to myelofibrosis and aggressive myeloid neoplasms,” Ghaith Abu-Zeinah, MD, a hematologist and oncologist at the Richard T. Silver Myeloproliferative Neoplasms Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, and colleagues wrote. “Prognostic measures to identify those at greatest risk for thrombosis, progression, and death in ET [events] are important for timely risk-adapted intervention with available treatments, and for development of interventional trials to improve event-free survival [EFS]. But predicting risks of events in ET has been difficult because ET is an uncommon and clinically heterogeneous chronic disease.”
Predicting excess mortality and disease progression related to ET presents challenges because such events often occur decades after a patient is diagnosed, the researchers continued.
“Thus, retrospective analysis of large cohorts with sufficiently long follow-up is required to identify prognostic measures to stratify risk in patients with ET,” they wrote.